She raised the child above Her head and held him as he squirmed pathetically in Her firm grip. Her brood watched from under darkened brows.
Would She cast him down? Or would She raise him up?
That day, word went out across the Empire that in the Fortress of Lucien a son had been born and claimed. The Prince of Ravens, the herald of the end times and keeper of death, lived and breathed in the dark city of Lucien.
Chapter One: Nameless
The Prince of Ravens stood gazing out of his room’s large arched window at the distant horizon when the clock struck the hour and the celebratory bells of his name day rang out once more across the city.
It was late morning, an hour short of midday, and yet the entire city spread out before him was cloaked in shadow. Then again, the city was always cloaked in shadow, for in the sky hung the dark, ever-present, billowing clouds that bore witness to the Empress’ power. Today they were shot through with still darker threads that showed they were heavy with rain. Most of the city’s people were indoors keeping dry, but the Prince of Ravens had always liked the rain.
A wind sprang up and rushed in through the open doors of the balcony to ruffle the Prince’s black hair, blowing it off his forehead. His eyes, darker and blacker even than the clouds, stood out in sharp contrast to his pale white skin, which had only ever known the cloaking shadows of the city and the closed interior of the Fortress. His clothing completed the somber appearance: robes dyed midnight black, the color of his office.
The clouds he was watching stretched out almost across the entire sky, stopping just short of the far distant horizon—a slim, bright, tantalizing view of the world outside Lucien. There, barely visible, was a touch of green that he imagined to be trees, and the bright gleam of sunlight reflected off a blue splash of lake. They were no more than fleeting impressions, flashes of light and swirls of color, which somehow made it through the murky darkness of Lucien to the Prince’s window. As he’d done countless times before, he tried to estimate the distance. Twenty leagues? Thirty? He knew how far a mile was but had little practical experience with judging distances. The Fortress was tall enough that one could see for miles in all directions unimpaired, but this vision hovered onthe very edge of sight, the very edge of the Empress’ immediate influence. It was far, however many miles away it was.
Someday, he said silently, trying to will the words to be true the way his brother Rikard had instructed him.Someday I’ll go there.
The clouds were constant here—the will of the Empress made it so, and as such there was no other possibility. There had not been sunlight in the city of Lucien, nor the surrounding countryside, in the Prince’s entire life. But he had read of the sun in books he wasn’t supposed to know existed; books that sat on dusty shelves in the deep bowels of the Fortress. Part of him, the part that needed to see things for himself in order to believe them, felt that such a thing couldn’t truly be. A giant ball of fire that hung in the sky? Ridiculous. There might not even be grass or trees or streams or anything of the sort, no matter what the books said. Maybe all that there was, the whole world over, was the bright metal of clockwork inventions and the dull gray-black of stone towers covered with the murky soup of industrial soot. That was all there was of his world, and all that would ever be.
And yet the light was there, on the horizon.
Once he proved himself to Mother, she would let him leave the city. She had promised that she would. And when She did, he would see for himself.
The skin on his back and shoulders grew warm, and he tensed.
The outer door to his chambers opened, and a soft breeze entered the room, light enough that it did not stir his heavy black robes and should have gone unnoticed. Indeed, it would have if anyone but the Prince of Ravens had been there. Quiet, stealthy movement—and then the door was shut once more. A sense of something dry and stale that reminded him of rustling scales and cold reptilian eyes bloomed in his mind, born of the new presence permeating the room. Beneath that sense was a boiling, sickly corruption, like the white fluid secreted from dying plants. His stomach churned, and he fought back the urge to be sick. The feeling passed as it always did, and he took a shallowbreath in through his mouth. The interloper moved a step closer, stopped, and stood watching his back.
He knew who it was—he always knew when one of the Children was near. They left a much more profound imprint on the world than the Commons, who were almost all Baseborn, and with the powers of the Raven Talisman he could sense them immediately. He decided to let her speak first and so remained stationary, staring out his balcony doors, feigning ignorance of her presence.
“Hello, brother,” said a soft and silky voice behind him.
“Hello, sister,” he said immediately, with a touch of boredom. He heard a rustling as she shifted in surprise, again sending images of dark scales and a sinuous form though his mind. All of his siblings were uneasy about how attuned to life he was—it was the only thing in which they could not best him.
Not that it matters,he thought. As of yesterday, he had been confirmed as the lowest of them all. Still, his siblings hated anything that made him seem somehow better than them in the eyes of their Mother, even if the difference was ultimately unimportant.
“What is it you need?” he asked in a civil monotone.
“Always staring out the window,” Symanta, Prince of Snakes, said, ignoring his question. She was sending a message: she would come to the purpose of her visit when it pleased her.
“Always looking… at what? What do you think you see out there, little brother? The city will never be yours—you are last in line and always will be. So what is it you look at?”
He did not respond immediately. She wouldn’t understand him even if he tried to explain. None of his siblings wished for anything but more power, for a way to control the area covered in darkness. None of them thought of the area outside Lucien, even though they lived there for the majority of the year in their respective Principalities. Perhaps they had once. He liked to think that they had,particularly his brother Geofred. He wondered vaguely if someday he too would forget his dreams of the sun.
“Nothing of importance,” he sighed.
“Liessss,” Symanta hissed. Without turning, the Prince knew her Talisman markings were glowing a sickly green, standing out along the sides of her long, graceful neck and over the backs of her hands as she sensed the half-truth he had spoken. His heart beat faster for a handful of seconds before he could calm it. He turned to face her.
“I was thinking of the future, Symanta; is that a crime?”
She breathed in sharply through her wide, flat nose, and her eyes narrowed dangerously. It was a crime for any to speak the names of the Children, and though such laws did not apply to the Children themselves, such a thing was still discourteous. However, his answer was ambiguous enough to pass the Snake’s test, and though she pierced him with her pale green eyes, studying his face for even the smallest trace of untruth, she found nothing. His heart fluttered nervously again under her scrutiny, but he knew his sister’s powers did not extend to mind reading. The mind was impenetrable—not even the Empress could break into a person’s mind unless they allowed it. She could command them, force them to do Her will, inflict pain on them until they willingly shared themselves with her, but she could not directly force her way into the thoughts of her subjects. Many feared she could, even the Most High, but the Children knew otherwise.
“No,” his sister said in answer, “it is not a crime to think about the future. But it doesn‘t matter, because you‘re already in disfavor. So you can think about the future all you want and it will come to naught.”
“Mother hasn’t made a judgment yet,” he said.
“Yet Mother is displeased.”
“Truly? I hadn’t noticed,” he responded.
